EchoGéo 52 | 2020Ho Chi Minh Ville, terrain de jeu(x) métropolitain(s)

Lost Pathways of Urban DevelopmentBillet

Erik Harms

Electronic versionURL: https://journals.openedition.org/echogeo/19671DOI: 10.4000/echogeo.19671ISSN: 1963-1197

PublisherPôle de recherche pour l'organisation et la diffusion de l'information géographique (CNRS UMR 8586)

Electronic referenceErik Harms, “Lost Pathways of Urban Development”, EchoGéo [Online], 52 | 2020, Online since 24August 2020, connection on 11 August 2021. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/echogeo/19671 ;DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/echogeo.19671

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Lost Pathways of UrbanDevelopmentBillet

Erik Harms

Reflections

1 Most ethnographic research and writing focuses on the intensive interaction

ethnographers have with their human collaborators (anthropos), who commonly form

the focus of anthropological research. The most celebrated method of ethnography is

“participant observation,” an all-encompassing immersive experience supplemented

by detailed field-notes, “thick description,” interviews, open-ended conversations,

shared experiences, surveys, library research, and more. Prioritizing such methods,

ethnography tends to focus, often for very good reasons, on forms of phatic

communication (things spoken), which are then translated in logocentric ways into

writing, the “graphos” of ethnography. In this essay, I show how reflecting on visual

images adds important perspectives to the anthropological toolkit. When

anthropologists focus on images, new objects of study come into focus1. This method is

not intended to replace the phatic aspects of ethnographic research but facilitates a

fruitful dialogue between ethnography and visual thinking. On the surface, these new

perspectives might appear to prompt a turn away from “the social” in order to focus on

material things. But the material is not the opposite of the social. Instead, it turns out

that material elements are as much a part of human stories as the actual stories

humans tell– the trees and pathways are social, and more-than-social, too.

2 Reflecting on images entails reflecting on the interaction between humans and the

material world, which is itself a complex production of human and non-human

entanglements.2 To show this, this essay dips into a collection of photographs I took

while conducting ethnographic research into the eviction of 14,600 household from a

place called Thủ Thiêm, and which I now maintain as a digital archive. I have written a

more conventional ethnography of this same development project in book form

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(Harms, 2016). There are many merits to the conventional genre, for the focus it allows

on life histories, political struggles, and engaging at length in academic debates. But

revisiting the site virtually through this photographic archive opens up the story again,

leading the investigation down new paths, in this case, as we shall see, actual paths.

3 The very act of choosing a small selection of photographs from a digital archive of

thousands of digital images captured over the course of several years of research is

itself a kind of analytic process. The process is informed by my own ethnographic

research, and what I learned from years talking to people. But looking at the photos

also transforms how I interpret that research. As I reflect on the images, they reflect

back on me, creating an interpretive dialogue. While most of my research and writing

has focused on the stories people told me, focusing on images allows other important

stories to emerge. Those stories emerge not only because they have been captured by

the camera, but because they are made meaningful by ethnographic knowledge that

informs the context within which they were photographed. That is not to say that the

meaning of the images simply rests upon what ethnography already knows – like a

simple explanatory caption. The process is more recursive than that, because the

images also transform the ethnographic lens – telling new stories, in different ways,

giving new angles. In this essay, the stories that emerge from reflecting on the images

take on a dreamlike quality, but they are not fantasies. Instead, they suggest that the

real fantasy is the idea of an ethnography ever being finished. There is always another

angle, another view. In this case, beyond what they do to the ethnographer, the images

also call out a dialogue between humans and the non-human world within which

humans are themselves enmeshed and co-constituted. The trees and pathways depicted

in these photographs are not human beings; but, as we see, they played an important

role in how people went about being human.

Cây Bàng

4 Long before the coming of the Great Plan, before architects and urban planners arrived

with schemes for building the city according to fanciful dreams of urban development,

there were pathways. In the Thủ Thiêm peninsula, one such pathway followed the bend

of the Saigon River. Over time, the pathway became a road. It is difficult to know when

the path first appeared, or when it became a road, but it is visible, albeit unnamed, on a

famous 1815 map of Saigon by Trần Văn Học. Eventually, it gained a name: Cây Bàng

Road.

5 The road was named for the trees planted in the narrow margin along the bank of the

river separating the path of movement from water’s edge. These trees do not appear on

maps, but their arrangement is not unplanned. They spread their horizontal branches

and their broad, flat leaves over hot earth, casting shadows that combine with breezes

from the river to cool life down and make it bearable. Photographs from when the trees

still lined the road reveal that they were planted at regular intervals, spaced so their

leafy crowns might overlap just enough to extend into an almost unbroken canopy. The

outermost leaves of one tree share shadows with the outermost leaves of the next. One

wonders if this species of trees, common throughout tropical Asia, evolved in tandem

with the human beings who plant them, for the canopy always leaves enough clearance

for the unimpeded passage of traffic and the gathering of people in the shade that

concentrates in the space between the trunks of the trees. It is common to discover a

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hammock strung between a pair of cây bàng trees, or a collection of plastic stools

gathered to form a simple café within its cool shadows. Symbiosis of this sort signals

the fruitful coming together of human beings and non-human things in the

incrementally built worlds that characterized Thủ Thiêm. Or so it was, in this now

transformed corner of the great motorbike metropolis.3 So it was. Until the end of the

first decade of the twenty first century.

Illustration 1 - Cây bàng trees along Cây bàng road (district 2, Ho Chi Minh City)

Author: Erik Harms. September 20, 2010.

6 The trees, like the road, are called cây bàng, Terminalia catappa. Provincial streets in

small towns across Vietnam – all the way from north to south – are commonly lined by

cây bàng trees. In cities and vacation destinations, rural themed restaurants and

leisurely cafes often take the name as well. The tree evokes the simple satisfaction that

comes from escaping the heat underneath the shadows of a tree in a hot climate. The

sentimental appeal of the tree is even captured in a four-stanza poem recited by

nursery school children. The poem, Cây Bàng, was written in the 1980s by a sentimental

poet named Xuân Quỳnh, famous not only for her poems but for dying alongside her

loving husband and young son in a tragic automobile accident. Children across Vietnam

often memorize the poem at a young age. Sometimes parents post videos of their

children on the internet, earnestly reciting the lines, proudly (or dutifully)

demonstrating their emerging talents with formal language4. Here are two of the four

stanzas from the famous poem:

Khi vào mùa nóng

Tán lá xoè ra

Như cái ô to

Đang làm bóng mát

When summer comes

Broad leaves unfurl

Like parasols

Making cool shade

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Bóng bàng tròn lắm

Tròn như cái nong

Em ngồi vào trong

Mát ơi là mát!5

Bàng shade is round

like a basket

I sit inside

Cool, oh how cool!

Illustration 2 - Đường Cây Bàng denuded of the trees that gave the street its name (District 2, HoChi Minh City)

Author: Erik Harms, September 20, 2010.

7 In 2010, when the pace of mass demolition began to pick up in order to clear the land

for the development of the Thủ Thiêm New Urban Zone, some of the first things to go

were the cây bàng trees. Two photographs taken along of Đường cây Bàng on the same

day in September of 2010, capture this process in motion (illustrations 1 and 2). One

photo shows the aftermath and the other shows a row of trees that will soon be sawed

down to a stump. The shade they cast will vanish with the trees, and with the shade a

space for gathering will vanish too. We now know as historical fact, almost a decade

after the photographs were taken, what we could then only assume: the chainsaws and

the felling of the trees were preparing the way for the bulldozers. Not just the trees, but

also the buildings, then entire neighborhoods.

Paths

8 Before demolitions, evictions, and terraforming transformed Thủ Thiêm, Cây Bàng

Road was one of only two paved roads visible from above ground. The other road was

called Lương Định Của, a mostly straight road with one bend leading from the ferry

station that delivered motorbike traffic into Thủ Thiêm from downtown. Lương Định

Của Road first cut through Thủ Thiêm before intersecting with Cây Bàng Road, which

looped around the river like an inverted question mark, before rejoining its partner at

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an “X” in the middle of the peninsula. After the intersection where the two roads

converge, Cây Bàng road straightens out, widens to two lanes in each direction,

changes name, becomes a commercial trunk road lined with shops, and continues

onward to another junction where it joins the national highway near the base of the

Saigon Bridge.

9 If you have only seen Thủ Thiêm from tourist maps, formal planning maps, war era US

military maps, or satellite images, you might be forgiven for assuming that there were

no other passageways in the whole peninsula. From above it looks like there are just

two roads – one straight, and the other curving back to meet the first. However, when

viewed from the ground – on foot, bicycle, motorbike, or three wheeled cart – the

reality is different. Until the coming of the bulldozers, Thủ Thiêm was crisscrossed with

a network of paths branching off from those two roads. It recalls the nascent form of

Saigon’s famous alleyway morphology6. The paths, however, retained their own

qualities. These paths were even less conspicuous than alleyways, easy to miss. They

are not only too small for even cars to pass, but demand the dexterity of motorbikes or

pedestrians. They formed a system of pathways, weaving a fabric of lived space, a world

which could always be quickly connected to the city but which also turned inward into

itself, not in a socially isolating manner but more in the manner of the curving

passageways of a carnival maze.

10 The pathways twist and turn just enough to alter the sense of direction and carve out a

world within a world, a place outside of city space but right in the middle of it. They are

pleasantly disorienting in a way that recalls the meandering pathways of Olmstead’s

Central Park, but they are not designed for strolls. These pathways gave Thủ Thiêm its

own unique character, meandering pathways leading to entire neighborhoods, or to

family compounds hidden in lush foliage but from which one could still gaze upon the

ever-growing towers of the growing metropolis across the river. They enable a

vernacular version of green urbanism built through habitation rather than formal

architectural training.7 These spaces are never fully outside of the urban, but engage in

a dialogue with the urban, borrowing certain cues from rural life, spatiality and

temporality, but also rejecting rural modes of production.8 The pathways do not just

lead to but form the heart of green living – not the green living of advertisements or

professional urban design, but of lived spaces that have emerged through a long history

of following and pushing back against the world of plants and soils and water, while

also engaging with the pull of the city and money and infrastructure9. The paths both

lead to and reproduce a world forged from a human desire to conquer nature while also

capturing the simple gifts it gives, like wind and shade, the rustling of grass, the

dappled shadows of leaves under shifting sun.

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Illustration 3 - A pathway leading from Cây bàng road into a residential area (district 2, Ho Chi MinhCity)

Author: Erik Harms, September 20, 2010.

11 The pathways in Thủ Thiêm emerged over time, through a series of negotiations

between people and plants, social organization and the properties of soil. The paths

that emerged inscribe a history of interaction – people battling back nature and also

following natural cues in search of paths of least resistance. The story of habitation in

places like Thủ Thiêm is often told as the history of “clearing the land” (khai phá), of

whacking away weeds and jungle, chasing away tigers, and delivering the markers of

civilization by building Vietnamese style houses, erecting community halls (đình) to

mark the establishment of a village, establishing markets, building a Catholic church

and a convent for the Lovers of the Holy Cross, and of course Buddhist temples and

pagodas, and a Cao Đài temple10. Families built ancestral tombs on their land, a Catholic

cemetery was built behind the church. But the fight to clear away and civilize nature

enlisted nature in its own project along these pathways, which both follow and reorient

plants and soil.

12 All of these signs of human life (and death) are connected not only by roads but by

pathways, eroded into the soil by the footsteps and tire tracks of an endless stream of

moving bodies. The pathways are built to resist the ravages of nature through human

intervention – built up like the berms dividing rice fields, packed muddy piles of earth,

sometimes shored up with broken bricks, poured concrete, rocks. In the process,

human agents gather up elements of nature to counteract its own natural processes of

erosion. They do these things by asserting their will, their human agency, but in doing

so they mobilize elements of nature to do this human work and are thus transformed in

the process as well: the edges of the paths are planted with trees and grasses are

allowed to grow, holding the soil in place. Sections prone to erosion are sometimes

shored up with concrete and sometimes by the strategic placement of a coconut tree.

Pathways crossing streams require simple bridges, or water diverted through tubes,

and sharp turns to accommodate meandering flows. Drivers on these pathways do their

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best not to fall into gulleys, and time their excursions with the rising and falling of the

tides.

13 The path is a curious kind of social space. It cuts through space as it binds, connects,

and opens up spaces of interaction. Like the side of the road, at certain places along the

way the space on the edge of the path creates little eddies of sociality, spaces of repose

alongside the space of movement conditioned by the direction of the path. The path is

not an artifact of pure nature but is also always more than human. It only comes into

being through a long and incrementally negotiated relationship between humans and

the non-human world. The path tells the human where to go, but in going there the

human transforms the path, adds to it, plants trees, sets up pit stops, lays gravel, cuts a

groove.

Illustration 4 - Eddies of sociality and spaces of repose along a pathway (district 2, Ho Chi MinhCity)

Author: Erik Harms, November 2, 2010.

14 If the path itself is a product of negotiation, so too is passage along the path from one

point to another. The skinniness of the path slows passage to a human pace. Chance

encounters along the path demand accommodation, subtle forms of communications.

One learns through experience where it is possible to bring one’s motorbike to a stop

without falling over, or how to avoid setting one’s foot into soft soil eroding towards a

ditch. Such subtle contours of the path must be known in order to accommodate others

coming from the other direction along the path. Puddles must be navigated, mud

avoided, curves anticipated, and blind spots can only be entered after the toot of a

horn. The path is a product of those who move along it, but it also tells the mover how

to move. The word for path, đường mòn, implies a road worn out (mòn) of the soil. Riders

also become worn out by the concentration required to navigate the path their own

history of movement has worn into existence.

15 The story of the pathway is in many ways the opposite of the tragedy of the commons

(Hardin 1968). Instead of the selfish depletion of a finite common resource, the path is

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the cumulative product of collective contribution to an unanticipated project, which is

not so much made from the spirit of collectivism but an accumulation of selfish desires

of individuals trying to get where each one wants to go. Picture a landscape open to all. It

is to be expected that human beings will forge pathways through it. The first walker may be

followed by the next, who treads upon the same soil trod by the first. Therein lies the story of the

path. Each human passerby is drawn into the passage of the previous, wearing into the ground a

pathway by virtue of treading upon it, surrendering nothing but the movement across space and

gaining in the process a pathway easing that movement.11

16 Such were the paths of Thủ Thiêm, such as they were, before the bulldozers came.

Illustration 5 - A pathway shored up with patches of concrete, packed earth, grass, and trees(district 2, Ho Chi Minh City)

Author: Erik Harms, September 25, 2010.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anand Nikhil. 2017. Hydraulic City: Water and the Infrastructures of Citizenship in Mumbai.

Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Baviskar, Amita. 2011. "Cows, cars and cycle-rickshaws: Bourgeois environmentalism and the

battle for Delhi’s streets." In Elite and Everyman: The Cultural Politics of the Indian Middle

Classes edited by Amita Baviskar and Raka Ray, 391-418. New Delhi: Routledge.

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Björkman, Lisa. 2015. Pipe Politics, Contested Waters: Embedded Infrastrucures of Millennial

Mumbai Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Eli Elinoff. 2017. "Concrete and corruption: Materialising power and politics in the Thai capital."

City 21 (5): 587-596. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/13604813.2017.1374778.

Gibert-Flutre, Marie. 2019. Les envers de la métropolisation: Les ruelles de Hô Chi Minh Ville,

Vietnam. Paris: CNRS Editions.

Gillen, Jamie. 2016. "Bringing the countryside to the city: Practices and imaginations of the rural

in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam." Urban Studies 53 (2): 324-337. https://doi.org/

10.1177/0042098014563031. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0042098014563031.

Hardin, Garrett. 1968. "The Tragedy of the Commons." Science 162 (3859): 1243-1248. https://

doi.org/10.1126/science.162.3859.1243. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/

162/3859/1243.full.pdf.

Harms, Erik. 2014. "Knowing into oblivion: Clearing wastelands and imagining emptiness in

Vietnamese New Urban Zones." Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 35 (2): 312-327.

---. 2016. Luxury and Rubble: Civility and Dispossession in the New Saigon. Berkeley: University

of California Press.

Hull, Matthew. 2012. Government of Paper: The Materiality of Bureaucracy in Urban Pakistan.

Berkeley: University of California Press.

Lockrem, Jessica. 2016. "Moving Ho Chi Minh City: Planning Public Transit in the Motorbike

Metropolis." Ph.D., Department of Anthropology, Rice University.

Rademacher, Anne. 2015. "Urban political ecology." Annual Review of Anthropology 44 (1):

137-152. https://doi.org/doi:10.1146/annurev-anthro-102214-014208. http://

www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102214-014208.

---. 2017. Building Green: Environmental Architects and the Struggle for Sustainability in

Mumbai. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Rademacher, Anne, and K. Sivaramakrishnan, eds. 2013. Ecologies of Urbanism in India:

Metropolitan Civility and Sustainability. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press.

Rademacher, Anne, and Kalyanakrishnan Sivaramakrishnan. 2017. Places of nature in ecologies

of urbanism. Hong Kong University Press.

Schwenkel, Christina. 2013. "Post/socialist affect: Ruination and reconstruction of the nation in

urban Vietnam." Cultural Anthropology 28 (2): 252-277.

Xuân Quỳnh. 1981. "Cây Bàng" in Chờ trăng. Hà Nội: NXB Hà Nội.

NOTES

1. The field of visual anthropology is vast and sophisticated, and rather than devalue it with a

single citation, I invite the reader to anticipate the work of Tram Luong, PhD candidate in

anthropology at Yale University, whose investigations into the way “optics” become entangled

with social processes inspire this essay.

2. Readers will recognize some affinity in this approach to anthropological work building from

Actor Network Theory (Hull, 2012), or some of the exciting new work on materiality and

infrastructure (Anand, 2017; Björkman, 2015, Eli Elinoff, 2017; Schwenkel, 2013). I also find

inspiration in work focusing on “ecologies of urbanism,” which combines careful anthropological

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attention to ethnography with attention to political-ecology and the interaction of people with

non-human nature and other things, both anthropogenic and otherwise (Rademache, 2015;

Rademacher and Sivaramakrishnan, 2013; Rademacher and Sivaramakrishnan, 2017).

3. The evocative description of Saigon as the “motorbike metropolis” comes from the title of a

dissertation by Jessica Lockrem (2016).

4. For examples of young children reciting the poem, and of teachers using it in lessons, see:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Z_Eed4VDko; https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=uwpWWtRP85g; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwpWWtRP85g

5. The poem appeared in a 1981 collection (Xuân Quỳnh, 1981). It is also available online here:

https://www.thivien.net/Xu%C3%A2n-Qu%E1%BB%B3nh/C%C3%A2y-b%C3%A0ng/poem-

cRUhkBdqnrx9VeymBdXu7w

6. On the alleyways of Ho Chi Minh City, see Gibert-Futre, 2019.

7. On the more formal variety of green urbanism, as practiced by architects in India, see

Rademacher, 2017.

8. The rural aesthetic, as Gillen (2016) so usefully notes, is often an essential (and often

“essentialized”) part of how urban actors construct vital aspects of their lives in the city.

9. In this way green living along such pathways is a working-class alternative to the “bourgeois

environmentalism” so provocatively criticized by Baviskar (2011).

10. For a critical history of “clearing the wastelands” in Ho Chi Minh City see Harms (2014, 2016).

11. These sentences are italicized to indicate that they are a reworking of Hardin’s famous

description of the tragedy of the commons. This is the original: “The tragedy of the commons

develops in this way. Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will

try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons. […] the rational herdsman concludes that

the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another; and

another... But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a

commons. Therein is the tragedy. Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase

his herd without limit--in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men

rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the

commons. Freedom in a commons brings ruin to all” (Hardin 1968).

ABSTRACTS

Photographic images from Ho Chi Minh City’s Thủ Thiêm Peninsula draw attention to now-

vanished trees and pathways from a place that has been demolished for the sake of urban

expansion. The trees and pathways in these photographs evoke an aspect of sociality often

overlooked in the logocentric anthropological and geographical literature on development-

induced evictions. Attention to images draws attention to the history of non-human nature and

to lost pathways of urban development, which in turn emphasizes their uses and the practices

which maintained them, revealing the interconnection between human sociality and the non-

human world. Unlike the "tragedy of the commons," which describes common resources

extinguished or depleted by unregulated use, these elements appear as a collective resource,

produced and cared for by their users. Reflecting on photographic images taken before and

during a period of mass eviction inspires a rethinking of the idea of the commons, crafted

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through a cultural approach that attends to the material landscape, the role of the non-human in

social relationships, and the social production of landscapes.

INDEX

Keywords: Saigon, Ho Chi Minh City, Thu Thiem, pathway, tree, eviction

AUTHOR

ERIK HARMS

Erik Harms, erik.harms@yale.edu, est Professeur associé à l’Université de Yale. Il a récxemment

publié :

- Harms E., 2019. Megalopolitan megalomania: Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam’s Southeastern region

and the speculative growth machine. International Planning Studies [En ligne], vol. 24, n,° 1,

p. 53-67. DOI: https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/13563475.2018.1533453

- Harms E., 2020. The case of the missing maps: cartographic action in Ho Chi Minh City. Critical

Asian Studies Early View. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.1080/14672715.2020.1792784

Harms E?, 2020. Unsettling Stories of Eviction from the New Saigon. City & Society Early View [En

ligne]. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/ciso.12288

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